Symposia
Parenting / Families
Olivia J. Derella, Ph.D.
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine
New York, New York
Olivia J. Derella, Ph.D.
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine
New York, New York
Emilie J. Butler, BA
Doctoral Student
University of Connecticut
Storrs, Connecticut
Jeffrey D. D. Burke, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Connecticut
Storrs, Connecticut
Background: Parents critically scaffold children’s emotional development. When families are faced with a crisis, parents model coping behaviors and explicitly coach children to use strategies to manage stress (i.e., socialization of coping; SOC). The onset of COVID-19 presented families with life-altering challenges often outside of their control. Understanding how parents responded to both their own and their children’s emotions during the first phase of the pandemic, as well as predictors of these responses, may reveal patterns that put caregivers and children exposed to uncertainty and stress at greater risk for maladjustment. The current study focused on the impacts of parents’ coping and SOC in terms of parent and child mental health symptom change from before to during COVID-19.
Method: Child (Mage = 9.9; 49% girls) and parent dyads (N = 45) were recruited from the community prior to COVID-19, oversampling youth with irritability. At T1, parents (Mage = 41.2; 91% female) completed a frustration task and measures of their own mental health (CES-D; PROMIS), emotion regulation (DERS), and child symptoms (RCADS-25; ARI-P). At summer 2020 follow-up (T2), 39 caregivers repeated surveys of parent and child symptoms and reported on their own coping (Brief COPE) and SOC related to COVID-19. Multivariate generalized linear models assessed impacts of coping and SOC on parent and child symptoms, controlling for pre-COVID levels, then explored pre-pandemic caregiver traits as predictors of coping.
Results: Coping-related behaviors were not associated with change in parent or child anxiety. Parents’ use of distraction (IRR = 1.12, p = .04) and self-blame (IRR = 1.23, p = .006) in response to stressors was associated with higher T2 depression. Parents’ encouragement of cognitive avoidance predicted higher T2 child depression (IRR = 1.13, p = .02) and irritability (IRR = 1.93, p = .03). Suggesting cognitive restructuring and behavioral avoidance tended to buffer these child symptoms during COVID-19. Caregiver coping responses were not, however, predicted by pre-pandemic characteristics.
Conclusions: Although we were unable to predict which parents were at risk of engaging in unhelpful coping-related behaviors, concurrent coping and SOC were implicated in worsening depression for both parents and youth, as well as child irritability. In the pandemic context, certain SOC strategies show promise for promoting youth emotional resilience. These findings suggest specific targets for both child and caregiver interventions during a global pandemic.